BlargMcLarg

Unless the market is big, most employers give zero incentive to accumulate domain knowledge. Between learning the new hot framework and accruing domain knowledge, one is clearly better for the average dev's career.

The advice is great in a world where people remotely cared about good software and are willing to pay for it. Not such great advice for reality.

Eh, from a 'different society', school stopped holding my hand going into adulthood and gave me far more freedom than any job has ever done so far. Most jobs had more in common with elementary school, trying to control most aspects. Only elementary school did the feedback loop far better.

None of that stopped procrastinating. Most people fill the excess time allotted regardless.

A lot of that struggle has to do with what others point out already: the onboarding processes and documentation being of shoddy quality and relying on word-of-mouth to transfer knowledge and repeatedly check in.

If you start raising future generations to be, you know, adults, instead of mentally stunting them into being eternal teens well into their 30s, and companies make an effort not to have a horrible onboarding and rely on 3 year tenures (and paradoxically do nothing to keep said employees that long), the problem is far less prevalent. Heck, most CS students are expected to do far more complex things at school without any assistance these days.

They've tried and were met with all kinds of retorts. It's more difficult to get an employer to spend an extra 50/month on your equipment, than to piss 10x of it away in inefficient code run on cloud computing. WFH at least got a foothold, most individuals don't even know what it is like to work in an area tailormade to your way of working.

People, as a collective, fail to learn from research or history and like to use their authority and charisma as a stand-in for logic and proof.

It isn't just the managers doing this. Anyone who isn't in a position of authority but has knowledge of the state-of-the-art, research on it, etc. can tell when someone in that position is pushing their ideals over actually having done research or doing logic beyond a bunch of unquantifiable 'what if' arguments. It takes 5 minutes of online research to dismantle their arguments. But it still happens regardless, even in CS and SD where myths are pushed as absolute truths.

There is a humongous gap between stars we can't reach and not putting every little detail of your life on the internet for all to see. Keeping information to yourself isn't something locked away behind extensive technical prowess.

Heck, if we are playing this game: most still make fun of their 'weird tech relative/friend' who can do this rather than ask them to help for what they will probably do for free. The people have spoken and continue to speak very clearly.

>Gen Z would be better served by building a sustainable career and life they enjoy.

Okay..

>Millennials inherited a job market offering unstable employment

>Chronic stress, burnout, depression and anxiety are all factors that could be triggered by work

>However, there are many who “retire” from one job just to pivot into another line of work that perhaps better aligns with creative passions, interests, or doesn’t pay well. Or one person retires and their spouse works, which makes the argument of retirement complicated.

Somewhere along the line, the author forgot to mention how one can even get to that 'sustainable career and life' reliably, and only mentioned several reasons why it won't happen.

Fair enough, didn't interpret the second line as also being an alternative universe.

Americans don't seem to live in sardine cans compared to the world. They mostly seem to transport themselves and work in sardine cans, though. Not very different from the remainder of the developed world, where people do live in sardine cans primarily.

Pretty sure the burden is on you to prove it is not just a method, but also the only method.

Most trivial things can be measured outside time. Many jobs measured on time, we already know why they are measured on time (low activity, presence-based jobs). Anything else, measuring based on behavior/time spent is management being lazy and not doing what they should be doing: comparing inputs and outputs, and measuring the impact of changes to them to improve productivity.

If a manager can't do something that basic, they shouldn't be looking for more bad proxies to hound people with. They should be doing the company a favor and quit.

>Why shouldn't the "productivity" of these staff be measured? Because you don't like it?

No one is arguing against this. Stop creating strawmen.

People are against draconian practices aimed at micromanaging people when data is already available, individuals are meeting targets or the targets aren't met due to something out of their control.

In the case of programming, if you have any decent system, you can query commit dates, opened bugs/features, closed bugs/features, time in meetings put on the public agenda, and more. None of this requires surveillance during the development process, only measuring inputs and outputs.

You can already do this in any decent devops system/management software without the surveillance.

Read my other comment, as your story is a far-too-often-used extreme used by the other extreme party to justify bizarre situations. For every one of those anecdotes is another anecdote of a team of seniors/architects pissing away half the development time only to come with an inadequate solution at the end of it. Guess what, it leads to the same 3-6 months of 'unfucking' with said feature now having to be juggled in prod, where it could have taken half a day of user-testing in a safe environment. When both extremes lead to the same problem, the anecdotes of 'how going fast destroyed my mental sanity' are not an excuse to endlessly bash the other extreme.

The key problem is always the same. The business wants to move as fast as possible, and developers are extremely concentrated in either the overly defensive "let us discuss ad nauseam" camp or the willing/passive "let's develop something and deliver it" camp. I don't agree with either, but frankly, I've had far more trouble convincing the former of their problem (analysis paralysis and wasting time) than the latter of theirs, and the former group is extremely convinced they have the high ground over the latter.

>I’ve dealt with this half a dozen times (maybe more) in my career.

And I've dealt with 'seniors' willingly sitting in meetings not achieving anything and pushing silly refactors more than half a dozen times only to run into performance issues, bugs and terrible deployments. User complaints don't lie, the grass ain't greener on the other side.

That's not an excuse when the same thing happens the other way around:

"Let's have discussions until 2 weeks before the deadline for something that needs 2 weeks of development time!"

"..wait, why are we having performance issues? Why did we not think of this one case that's occurring every 5 seconds?"

People are very eager to take article's example and use it to slam individuals they have a vendetta against, while looking away from the other extreme which has the exact same problem. Going too fast is a problem. So is going too slow and LARPing as a clairvoyant, getting close to a deadline and then business forces you to get disciplined and deliver something not battle-tested.

That's a binary take if I've ever heard one. The quadruple speed also means products hit the test groups sooner and one can iterate on it faster. Nothing in the story implies the 'star developer' is done once the code hits production, but that's the assumption made. Meanwhile, the 'part of the team that actually cares' may as well be paralyzing themselves through overanalyzing what-ifs without gathering enough information, with the most extreme cases bike-shedding weeks worth of development time.

Surely a group of people who deem themselves 'intelligent' can broaden their perspectives a little?

Retirement is baked into the tax system for most countries in Europe. Expenses don't go over 1.5k net for most single people, including rent, utilities and more. That still leaves 1k to use however you want. You want more spending money, find someone to share the costs with.

It's the US that's the outlier in the world, and it does so at the cost of others.

So you're using an article from 2014 and grasping at straws to make a point against WFH or what? Just what are you trying to say here?

Most companies can't even handle truly passionate people. Passionate people generally fight to deliver quality at a decent pace. They care too much about their work to ignore inefficiencies, bureaucracy, poor quality, and more. These companies claiming they care about 'passion'? They are the same ones telling you the equivalent of 'shut up and just do the job' the moment you care too much. Your only reward is double the grunt work for a 5% pay increase at best. The places where this isn't the case and there isn't a huge caveat? They are a blip on the market.

If passion really was so important, they wouldn't do so much to turn it into a joke and make all their workers meek or jaded.

Most companies using anything MS on the dev side are neck-deep in it. Most .NET stacks don't go beyond JS and F#. It's a catch-22 where the in-house won't learn outside the Microsoft-approved stuff, so the best new fits are bound to the Microsoft stack and the ones making decisions go for more vendor lock-in stuff, etc.

I've had managers push for Blazor several times, despite the market of capable frontend devs who know/can learn JS being far bigger, and the technologies being more mature and proven. They aren't worried about vendor lock-in, they encourage it.

It's a shame too. Much of their tech is great, but we are seeing several of the good old M$ shenanigans popping up again, after their 'big open source' push.

>I think experts get too deep into values that aren't practically valuable

This describes the majority of practices today. Individuals pushing their own values, selling it and hoping it sticks despite having zero evidence to back it up. Even most things 'proven' are fairly context-dependent.

The majority don't even bother making a simple cost-benefit analysis these days. As if any significant social change is just going to break even from moment one and staying 'we should do X because it will give us Y' is a good enough argument. It is crazy how casually some of them advocate for practices that won't break even in the span of a few years at best. That's a lifetime in the field of software development.

It's not just entrepreneurship. European countries are notorious for safeguarding people against mistakes at the cost of everything else. Safeguarding not just meaning 'you can't fall deep into poverty', but also 'we will give you the means to stay at your current level'. That's how you end up with young people earning median household income unable to get a semi-decent apartment while Joe with a family of 4 making the same amount could never afford his current home, but passed the checkpoint before the bar got raised too high.

Great if you're established or the economy is flourishing where you want it. Not so great if important sectors are dwindling and you have yet to establish yourself.

Those marks are still used in many places to deny would-be renters a place as they are deemed 'insecure' by the landlords. At that point, it is effectively "unaffordable" as the supply is artificially staggered and the minimum to enter is higher than the market would dictate otherwise. Most could make it work and still have room to spare. This includes countries with safety nets capable of bailing out individuals who mess up.

Might not be the case in Australia, but it certainly exists.

"Having any dedication outside your company is stealing from your company. Now here's an advertisement showing you the excitement of cheating on your partner for some quick fun." May not be causation, but they sure are eager to not let a good crisis go to waste.

Funny thing is, at least a few decades ago companies realized having a good employee's kid come work for them was a boon. Now they complain about the lack of good workers without thinking about the consequences of their good workers not reproducing in stable families.

>That's not really counterpoint, it's just a occasional problem behavior of some individuals that remote makes more difficult

Yet anecdotally, it has occurred in every open office so far. Managers were also eager to applaud this behavior rather than berate it, while at the same time looking at the actual work performed, scratching their heads why nothing was happening and then giving said individuals special treatment. I'm not alone in experiencing this, either.

>One big problem with remote is that it makes a whole lot of stuff that can happen organically in an office into intentional practices that require discipline, which means they're a lot easier to neglect.

"That's not really a counterpoint, just coach them not to do that." If your argument against my point is 'well just teach people differently, also it doesn't happen that often at all (despite it being a common complaint on the internet)', you'll also have to argue why your point is special enough not to deserve the same response.

Companies relying on a lack of documentation and individuals using said documentation is a humongous risk even outside the remote debate, and that's most of the requirements for remote covered. Those 'organic intentional practices' don't seem so great when 80% of the seniors on the team leave without a paper trail and the remainder knows zilch.

>For example, in work I regularly overhear O(2 minute) conversations in which co-workers talk about edge cases in our system that I didn't realize existed

Counterpoint: there are types which really like to insert themselves in every conversation or discussion. To the point it hampers not just their own work, but the work of everyone else. Taken to the extreme, they even create a state of helplessness in others, where these individuals become a funnel for all others to ask questions and obtain knowledge from. This is without accounting for all the noise pollution it creates.

Opponents are very eager to pull out these 'what about the office talks?' arguments, but whether the benefits even outweigh the downsides isn't obvious at all.

Heck, most developer work cultures use Scrum, and they can't even work through a single item on their retrospectives. Surely a bit of skepticism is warranted.

It is culture in about every form. Education isn't actively made to teach people to be independent. Work culture for the past X decades has been pushing people to be dependent on each other directly. Social culture has pushed people to be dependent on work to fulfill various needs beyond a paycheck.

And despite us catering towards the open office for multiple decades, we are still seeing it is barely on par with an ad-hoc WFH call while other things are going awry. Anyone with any kind of perspective can tell these comparisons aren't remotely fair.

>My complaint should probably be towards the company though and not the parent.

Yes, it should. Don't put responsibility on people you know won't fulfill it. The fact people even entertain the idea of not putting the blame on bosses for this is ridiculous.

Surely all the time spent making everyone homogenous and replaceable would infer otherwise.

Nothing is showcasing it works. We are on the downward path just as much as every other country, being more and more atomized and pulled away from friends and family due to social and economic incentives.

Dutch stereotype is to be 'friendly' outward but always keep people who you aren't close to at a distance. That attitude comes back to bite you when you move away past your early 20s or use your work life as your social lifeline in today's work environment. If it wasn't for social services, the consequences would be far worse. But those social services are also contributing to what keeps the majority from staying close together in the first place.

Cool. Now go on a few forums and ask it in public, to large numbers, and see who responds more favorably and who responds less favorably. Hint: it is almost always women who are far more unaccepting of it than men, with a pretty significant margin.

This is the tip of the iceberg. Once you actually delve into the differences, who says them in what stages of life and why, you'll quickly see how deep this rabbit hole goes and what a gross oversimplification "well men and women both don't like it" is, and why these kind of articles do nothing but harm both men and women in the long term.

>That has indeed changed and has nothing to do with men/women in particular.

That's where you are wrong. The cultural expectations are still very similar to 1970, but the means to achieve them have worsened considerably. Something like unable to afford housing hits men far harder than women when it comes to social aspects. Language reflects this, with words demonizing men who still live at home or living in a bad place being far more prevalent than the other way around.

Men and women work on different formulae. You can't simply say 'oh we give both the same input so the effect is the same'.